Last week the News spoke with former professional footballer Ian McHattie about his recollections of Pele, against whom he played in the early 1970s.
And it was a remarkable tale of how a lad from Palnure ended up taking the pitch against arguably the world’s greatest ever exponent of the beautiful game.
In the passing, Ian told me a little about his life – which not entirely to my surprise was no less colourful than his encounter with Pele.
Milestones included Creetown Primary School, south London and Crystal Palace FC, the fire brigade in Surrey and – by pure happenstance – a sales career selling gas fires and wood burners all over the British Isles.
It seemed too good a chance to miss – so I asked if he would care to share his story with readers.
He happily agreed – and a few days later we’re sitting chatting in the kitchen of his home in Gatehouse which he shares with wife Julie and 12-year-old Labrador-Staffie cross Rio.
I knew that Ian had played for Creetown and came from the local area.
But my assumption that he drew his first breath in Galloway turns out to be wrong – 5,000 miles wrong, to be precise.
“I was actually born in Tanganyika in east Africa,” Ian informs me, handing me a tasty-looking bacon and egg roll.
“That was in 1952, when my dad was head forester for the British Government there.
“It was a beautiful country and all the things you see on wildlife programmes you saw in real life.
“There were five or six house boys and soon I was speaking fluent Swahili because I was with them all the time.
“One boy was 13 and it was his job to look after me.
“He killed a snake once when I was sleeping outside in the sun.
“I can remember sitting down and speaking Swahili fluently with him.
“Kids can do that because they can pick up a language so easily.
“But the Mau-Mau troubles had started, which was an uprising against British rule.
“People were on their hit list – and one of them was my dad because he worked for the colonial administration.
“The Mau-Mau were setting traps for people to maim them and our wee spaniel got killed in one of those traps.
“I was only two when the trouble began and eventually we had to get out.
“Getting on the plane at the airport my mum turned to my dad and said ‘well, they didn’t get you fella!’
“When we came back to Scotland I was seven and my sister was 18 months old.”
Ian tells me he is of Highland stock, his father Norman hailing from Nairn while his mother Christina MacArthur was an Argyll lass.
Perhaps it was his parents’ Highland roots, he suggests, that brought the family home from Africa to remote Strathpeffer, in the glens north-west of Inverness.
“All I remember is that it was bloody cold,” says Ian, smiling at the memory.
“When I went to the primary school there you had to fight.
“You fought the toughest boy first to see how tough you were.
“Then you fought the second best boy and it was only when you beat one and won a fight that you were okay.
“To be fair I was gobby – so I probably deserved it!
“We were only there six months and moved to Creetown when my dad got a job with A&B Matthews Solicitors in Newton Stewart.
“Soon after that we moved to Palnure where we ran the post office.
“I attended Creetown Primary School then Creetown Junior Secondary which is the Gem Rock Museum now.
“It closed after a year and then I went to the Douglas Ewart in Newton Stewart.
“I loved football – my dad even painted goalposts for me on the stonework below the road bridge in Creetown,” Ian recalls.
“They are still there today and I can take my grandchildren there to see them.”
Football was fiercely competitive in the sixties, Ian recalls, with school, district and regional levels providing a ladder of progression for talented youngsters.
Talent scouts from big clubs north and south of the border would attend games to make a note of the best players who would perhaps be watched several times before being offered a trial – and the chance to sign up if they impressed.
“My dad was very supportive and always came to watch me,” Ian tells me.
“I started off in the Ewart under-14 team and would play against the likes of Kirkcudbright and Stranraer.
“But the under-15s was when it all came to a head and I went for selection for Dumfries and Galloway.
“I got through and so did John McInally from Gatehouse – he was a great goalkeeper who went on to play for Manchester United.
“But I didn’t make it into the South regional team and thought I had missed the boat.
“I was only 15 but that was the age you went to a club as an apprentice – and at 17 they would decide whether to sign you as a pro.”
Ian had just turned 17, he remembers, when lady luck decided it was time to give the young footballer a helping hand.
“I was playing in an under-18 cup final for Creetown against Fleet Star in Gatehouse,” he says with a chuckle.
“It was at Garries Park and the last game of the season for the summer league.
“We beat Star and after full time this guy comes over and asked if I wanted to play professional football.
“I thought he was joking – but he was a scout from Crystal Palace who happened to be on holiday in the area.
“The next week I signed for Tarff Rovers and he came and watched me play four or five times.
“I got invited down for a trial with Palace and did okay then the scout came up to watch me in one final game – a South of Scotland Qualifying Cup game against St Cuthbert’s.
“We won – and I signed for Palace in October, 1969.
“I was put on a train from Dumfries and told there will be a silver-haired guy with a rose in his breast pocket waiting for you at Euston. The man meeting me was a club official, Arthur Rowe, the former Spurs manager who invented the push-and-run style of play.
“What was it like for a 17-year-old boy from Palnure suddenly finding himself as a professional footballer in London?
“Well, there was quite a bit of resentment to these Scots lads swanning in,” he recalls.
“I signed at 17 and there were all these English boys doing their apprenticeships trying to get a professional contract.
“A lot of them were getting bombed out – so it wasn’t the warmest welcome.
“It didn’t do me any harm and I learned to put up with stuff like that.
“Once you proved yourself you were alright.
“But it wasn’t great when you’re on the bus to away games and your own teammates don’t talk to you.
“These guys were mates with the ones who got rejected after their apprenticeships finished.
“But the Scottish players in the first team like Gerry Queen from Kilmarnock were fantastic to me.
“It was certainly a different environment in Croydon compared with Palnure.
“All I was interested in was football but I did get a wee bit homesick.
“But the truth is, without getting too philosophical about it, whatever you do in life everything is a learning curve.”
Football in the late Sixties could be a brutal affair with treatment for injuries often being as agricultural as the tackles. So it was for Ian, I learn, when a promising career with Palace was snuffed out almost before it began.
“I played for the youth team then the reserves but never played for the first team,” he says with a tinge of regret.
“There was this youth cup game against Millwall which was like Rangers versus Celtic, only worse.
“My ankle got injured in a tackle and I didn’t realise it was broken.
“The physio was a former player and old school in his approach.
“‘You have to go through the pain barrier, son!’ he just told me.
“That’s how primitive the medical side of things were.
“I was still hobbling around when Gerry Queen asked why I’d not been sorted yet.
“He was furious and took me down to the local hospital himself to get X-rayed and that’s when they discovered it was broken.
“It had been like that for at least three or four weeks.
“Then, when I was in rehab, Graham Leggatt, a former Scottish internationalist who was managing Toronto Metro, came over looking for players to play in the North American League.
“It suited Palace to let me go over and get match fit over the summer.
“There were two Canadian teams, Toronto and Montreal, along with Dallas, St Louis, Atlanta, Miami and Rochester.
“We were flying back and forward for games twice a week and did not need a lot of training.
“For a little lad from Palnure I was gobsmacked by it all and I absolutely loved it.
“My first season was really good and in 1971 I got in the NASL All Stars squad because I had so many goals and assists.
“The next season I played for Toronto against Santos and Pele, two years after he won the World Cup with Brazil.
“To be honest, the whole Santos team were superstars.”
Ian laughs when I suggest 20-year-old McHattie must have had a whale of a time Stateside.
“Well, the social side was magic because it was one big adventure,” he says in a mischievous understatement.
“I didn’t feel homesick at all because I was enjoying life so much.
“Put it this way, my Scottish accent wasn’t exactly a drawback.
“After a game the girls would say ‘just talk to me’.
“‘What do you want me to talk to you about?’
“‘I don’t care – just read out the menu, it doesn’t matter!’
“Toronto had a massive Italian following – the city had one of the world’s biggest Italian communities outside Rome.
“When things were going great it was fantastic but when they weren’t it was the complete opposite.
“With Toronto Metro things were going bad in my second season there.
“During one game the fans were giving me stick then I scored a great goal.
“I ran up to the Italian section and just stood there and opened my arms.
“Some of them went mental but some cheered as well!
“We played against some top European sides too and I count myself lucky to have experienced that.”
On his return to Palace, Ian explains, the club chose not to re-sign him and at the age of 21 he ended up playing part-time for Dover then Ramsgate.
“After that the injuries started to kick in and I just drifted out of football,” he says.
“To be honest I had started to lose a bit of enthusiasm.
“I joined the fire service full-time in 1975 and it was great – probably because I’d always liked being part of a team.
“You were going into situations where you could 100 per cent rely on each other. It was like a brotherhood and for me it was magical.”
● Don’t miss part two of Ian’s story in next week’s Galloway News.
